This Road of Worth by Gerald Sampson - Short, Drama - Young Victor is an emotional train wreck. After deciding to end his life he, by chance, meets Tyler. Tyler stops Victor from committing suicide and shows him that can change for the better, but what will become of these two men when Victor's mentor's will is tested? 11 pages - pdf, format 8)

I enjoyed this very much. The characters were well written and it was heartwarming. One thing:

LOTS of exposition is unnecessary and could be cut out. Some of Old Victor's dialogue could be cut, and the entire bit by the reporter could be completely cut. I understand this is a short, so some information has to be relayed due to lack of time, but you could benefit from taking things out.

I'd really like to see this produced in the near future, good luck!

Hey Gerald,

Hopefully your around to comment... but the formatting here is all wrong. I couldn't tell the difference between dialogue blocks and the action blocks.

Action blocks - Should be 3-4 lines a paragraph. Changes in focus or action will take us to another action block/paragraph.

Dialogue - Once again, I couldn't really tell what was dialogue and what was action. It kind of bled together here.

When you intro a character, you should CAP the character and follow it w/ a very brief description... no need to CAP that particular character after that.

I can't judge the story fairly because I just couldn't get past the formatting. This will turn off a lot of readers.

Read some scripts here on the boards and get yourself acclimated. And perhaps look into some screenwriting software to help guide you through the formatting process. I suggest buying Final Draft, but I know there's some cool software you can download for free like Celtx.

All the best,

Michael

Gerald, your logline is riddled with errors.  Common sense says that when a simple logline is messed up, the body of the script will be as well.

Because of that, I'm not even going to open this up.  Sorry.  Clean up the grammar and punctuation in your log so you don't scare away your readers before they even open your script.

Hi Gerald

The logline is indeed full of errors but I read the script anyway. It was a nice tale, sweet with a twist I didn’t see coming but the formatting is all wrong. The people in the business who read scripts have to go through a lot and they throw them away if there’s errors in the logline or the formatting is off. You could write the best story in the world but it will be ignored if it is not written correctly.

I’d suggest trying to get hold of some script writing software and reading scripts. There’s plenty of scripts on this website and all over the web, as well as tutorials, to get you started with the basics.

As it is, formatting aside, the script reads like a stage play and I do think it might work well at the theatre! If you want it to work as a short movie then there’s a lot of changes to the dialogue and the mechanism for telling the story. Best of luck with this.

Mark

Gerald, look into getting free screenwriting software online.  The two best known ones are Trelby and Celtx.  Either one, while not perfect, will help you tremendously in progressing as a writer.  Sadly, it is the case that without proper formatting, no matter how compelling the story, very few people will get past the first page.  Good luck and repost it in the correct format, and you'll get a lot more reads, I promise.

Gary